By and large, New Zealand elects governments that then set about doing what they promised, in some form or another. But sometimes we end up with a government that goes off-piste for whatever reason. Sometimes it is a rogue element and sometimes it is deliberate circumvention of considered norms, but mostly it is driven by adherence, often blindly, to a political ideology.
There have been two recent examples of such off-piste behaviour. The first was the hijacking of the Lange Government by Finance Minister Roger Douglas. The second is this current Labour Government’s descent into race-based politics.
Roger Douglas was a man on a mission, and he had the power to carry it out. He, as finance minister, knew the perilous position New Zealand was in after nine years of the Muldoon-led Government. Robert Muldoon was a nationalist in the truest sense. Everything he did he thought would make New Zealand a better place. Many of the things he did do were opposed by the very politicians who now wax lyrical about our renewable energy supplies.
Think Big was opposed by many, but Muldoon had the foresight to see that amid the oil shocks of the ’70s and ’80s energy independence was a sensible and desirable position to be in. It helped that New Zealand had abundant oil, gas and coal. Think Big delivered the Marsden oil refinery extension, vast oil exploration and the corresponding Taranaki oil boom, which also led to the development of Motunui. Our abundant coal reserves also saw the building of the Huntly power station, begun under Labour in 1973 and extended and completed mostly under Muldoon.
What Robert Muldoon was ill-equipped to deal with was the economic headwinds besetting the global economies and the landmine of his extensive borrowing to fund Think Big. His solution was the wage-price freeze, which ultimately was his undoing, along with punitive high taxation and import controls.
When the Lange Labour Government was elected they were met with a constitutional crisis, a failing Bank of New Zealand and an economy that was on its knees. They had to do something, and up to the plate stepped Roger Douglas. New Zealand voters were blindsided by the Douglas economic prescription, which cut a swathe through the New Zealand economy. Not a single one of his policies and plans was in the Labour Party manifesto, yet they were done anyway. Our highly subsidised farmers were cut loose, subsidies removed overnight. Each evening on the news we saw distraught farmers going bankrupt and being marched off their farms. It was one of the biggest wealth transfers ever seen in New Zealand history and it was explained away as ultimately necessary.
The currency was floated and immediately devalued. Countless jobs were lost as businesses collapsed. Just three years later the stockmarket crashed and that saw even more carnage with many investors, old and young, losing their shirts after blue chip stocks like Equiticorp, Chase and others spectacularly failed.
None of that was ever campaigned on, and many of the effects of Roger Douglas’s axe-wielding are still felt today. Ultimately those actions turned off a generation from ever voting Labour again, and in 1990 Jim Bolger won a landslide election after the voters turned on the Labour Party.
There is some merit in what Douglas did, but the effects implementation were devastating. Jim Bolger’s National Government, however, maintained the status quo, as the National Party is wont to do. The only lasting reform that the Bolger Government implemented was the Employment Contracts Act, which systematically decimated the unions, from which they have never really recovered. Roger Douglas’s decisions and actions were never telegraphed or even spoken of before their election. They blindsided everyone.
Now we reach the present day, with two nine-year terms of what can only be described as the managerial class era of New Zealand politics. At the end of the Bolger/Shipley era, we had the election of Helen Clark’s Labour coalition. Clark was the ultimate manager and, far from reforming, she won support by simply maintaining the status quo. She turned Labour into the National Party. When she was finally voted out we had another managerial-style leader, John Key. He returned the National Party to its status quo roots. There were no meaningful reforms of any consequence under Key. He governed for governance’s sake and to extend his CV to include prime minister. He had three personal goals from his tenure in office, to be the longest-serving National Party prime minister, to win at least four terms and to leave with a knighthood.
But John Key was no Sir Keith Holyoake, and when it looked like he couldn’t get a fourth term he bailed on two of the three goals and quit while he was ahead. All he ever achieved as prime minister was getting himself knighted. He did of course try to change the flag, boasting often to business people and donors that his sheer force of personality would get that over the line, but he couldn’t even manage that.
Enter the hapless Bill English: a leader he was not and, although a competent finance minister, he led the National Party to defeat. We now had Jacinda Ardern as prime minister.
She set about wrecking much of Muldoon’s Think Big legacy, and even Winston Peters was unable to stop it. We now import dirty coal from Indonesia instead of using our own resources. We have banned oil and gas exploration and decommissioned Marsden Point so that we are now dependent on the vagaries of shipping schedules and other countries’ refineries.
But much, much worse was to come. Because lurking in Ardern’s caucus were Maori separatists who secretly planned to put in place a system of governance that threw out all our constitutional norms in favour of a race-based apartheid system. But they needed a parliamentary majority to even begin, and so they were the gleeful recipient of the global madness that was Covid and won an unprecedented parliamentary majority in their own right.
Now they had what they wanted, and the ideological burp of Maori nationalism became a full-throated belch with massive farts added in. In the middle of the pandemic Labour decided to implement one of their plans, the separation of the health system into one for Maori and one for everyone else. The previously secret He Puapua document eventually came to light, and despite denials from the government that this a blueprint for the abrogation of our constitutional norms, it has systematically been implemented.
The health system has been separated and segregated, the local body electoral system upended, the media subjugated through draconian funding agreements to promote Maori wonderfulness. Now we have seen the theft of council water assets, handed over to the control by an iwi kleptocracy through a complex ownership structure that vests 50 per cent control of those water assets in Maori, who make up just 15 per cent of the population. All of this was rammed through the parliament with scant scrutiny from the media or a shell-shocked and ineffective opposition.
Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party never campaigned on a single item I’ve listed. Instead, they campaigned on solving housing affordability by building 100,000 KiwiBuild homes, ending child poverty and building a tramway to the airport. Of their stated policies and promises they’ve not even come close to delivering on them. They’ve quietly given up and headed down a divisive path that may well end in bloodshed. They are abrogating our democracy and actually performing a bloodless – for the present – coup.
Our democratic institutions are being upended, our media are complicit, and it is all policy and platforms never campaigned upon. It is as destructive as the actions of Roger Douglas, and sadly unlikely to be overturned in any meaningful way. New Zealanders are sleepwalking to their own subjugation.
Will a Luxon-led National Party undo any of this? Unlikely. Christopher Luxon is part of the managerial class. He leads the National Party, the party of the status quo. National are unlikely to undo a single thing unless they are forced to. They are globalist in their ethos, but so is the ACT Party. The only way for any of this to ever be undone is if National are dependent on more than the ACT Party to govern and dependent on a party that will put New Zealand and New Zealanders first, before any others. Does such a party even exist?
We need to stop thinking about right and left: that is redundant. The issue is more that of globalism versus patriotism. We need patriots and we need people to do the right thing, not virtue signal. We need a party and politicians with backbone.
If we don’t fight then you are going to witness your country being stolen from you. Silence is not an option. Inaction is not an option. Relying on any party currently in the parliament is not an option. Waiting for the media to do something, anything, is not an option.
The very future of our country is at stake; otherwise, we are handing it over to the kleptocrats, and they don’t care as much for your country as you do. We are witnessing a government slowly but surely stealing this nation from the indolent, meek and silent majority. None of it was promised, but it’s happening whether you like it or not.
Hopefully, the population will reject this path and, hopefully, the Ardern Government will be held with the same opprobrium as the Lange/Douglas government is.
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